Announcing
THE CURSED BLADE OF WEK
A sword & sorcery novella arriving in 2027!
The Wildcraft Drones
Can machines rewild us?
An AI breakthrough connects a team of scientists with a wild dolphin, but progress is neck-and-neck with climate breakdown. Class differences are only the first challenge when romance blooms between college girls at a soil remediation site. A forlorn drone seeks reassignment after his human companion dies—but a reckless band of rebels has other plans.
T. K. Rex’s debut collection explores a turbulent timeline where the role of intelligent machines changes alongside nature and humanity, in fourteen tales from the climate crisis and beyond. This is the world of The Wildcraft Drones.
Welcome to the Grungle.
“Gorgeous, hopeful, and strange”
— Annalee Newitz, bestselling author of Automatic Noodle
"A much-needed vision"
— Kim Stanley Robinson, bestselling author of The Ministry for the Future
"Each story dazzles and haunts"
— Nina Schulyer, author of In This Ravishing World and Open the Floodgates
"Essential reading for the Anthropocene.”
— Sarena Ulibarri, author of Another Life
"a rewilding playbook for unruly life forms"
— Syr Hayati Beker, author of What a Fish Looks Like
"a centuries-spanning epic of ecological renewal after capitalism"
— E. G. Condé, author of Sordidez
"A reminder that if we do not see ourselves as part of the collective, we lose the tools to save ourselves"
— Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Ignyte award-winning author of & This Is How To Stay Alive
"T. K. Rex reimagines the world...in our full engagement with the biosphere's complexity"
— Ray Nayler, Hugo-winning author of The Tusks of Extinction and Palaces of the Crow
"intricate, complex, deeply imagined and utterly transporting"
— Karen Joy Fowler, Nebula-winning author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"radically hopeful and unflinchingly anticapitalist"
— M. M. Olivas, author of Sundown in San Ojuela
"Worldbuilding and technology that make my mind melt"
— Sam J. Miller, Nebula-winning author of Blackfish City
"will make you laugh out loud, ugly cry, and fall in love"
— Lauren C. Johnson, author of The West Facade
"a timely reminder of what might yet be, should technology be placed in more just hands"
— C. G. Aubrey, Managing Editor of Reckoning Magazine
"These stories will make you think"
— Diana Paxson, author of The Chronicles of Westria
"sure to spark hope in anyone dreading our climate's future"
— Doug Henderson, author of The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club
"dense with sly humor, sharp metaphor, and an abiding love for the natural world"
— Cynthia Gómez, author of Muñeca
"a beautiful elegy...to explore our fallibility and what it means to be human in an astonishingly resilient natural world."
— Tina LeCount Myers, author of The Song of All
"a rulebook of how to live in community and find a healthy path to our future."
— Renan Bernardo, Nebula finalist author of Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle
"sees past the glittering false promises of technology and understands that the future is in the hands of people, in all of their beautiful variety."
— June Martin, author of Love/Aggression
"an incredible affirmation of life without looking away from its horrors"
— Michael J. DeLuca, author of The Jaguar Mask
"Rare as morel mushrooms, sweet as acorn bread, and unexpected as BBQ-flavored crickets"
— Ruthanna Emrys, author of A Half-Built Garden
"Skepticism and hope bloom in equal measure"
— Khan Wong, author of Down in the Sea of Angels
"Like the best science fiction, these stories make me want to get my hands dirty."
— Chelsea Sutton, author of Krackle's Last Movie
"An essential text for any solarpunk’s bookshelf!”
— Andrew Dana Hudson, author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures and Absence
"Essential reading for the Anthropocene.”
— Sarena Ulibarri, author of Another Life
"a marvelous debut."
— Josh Wilson, editor of The Fabulist
"brave, bold, and inspiring realism"
— Rebecca Gomez Farrell, author of the Wings Rising duology
Recent Shorts
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The lanky, black-jeans office worker, who usually orders a Tripleceratops latte, stares at the chalkboard above my head like he might get something different this time. He looks almost as tired as me, and I was tired before I even got to this island. “Why is ‘Stego’s Secret’ so expensive?”
I consider a snarky reply about profit margins to make him smile ‘cause he’s always been cool to us, but it’s, like, 9 a.m. “They feed the coffee beans to the ornithischians and then fish them out of the poo before roasting them. Gives it that Mesozoic aroma.”
4500 words
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The hologram is photorealistic, the motion lifelike, and programming fully responsive. It’s acting…shy? It shifts its head, looking at me with both eyes, like an owl with a narrow parrot’s beak, then bites cautiously at the phone that’s still in my hand, beak passing through the screen. It paws at a code on the floor. I scan the code, and a map appears on my screen, highlighting a short trail along the cliffs. Proto looks toward them, through the exhibit hall. “You want me to follow?”
Proto hops excitedly, tippy-tapping its front feet, which look a bit like scaly raccoon paws.
“Alright, lead the way.”
6000 words
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The Submersible aQuatic Cetacean Communication Robot—professionally known as SQCCR, affectionately known as “Squawker”—splashes into the harbor from the starboard side of the Charlotte’s Web at dawn. A few brilliant, cool drops hit Julia’s skin.
The heat index is already 96 and aiming for the red by ten. What must the dolphins think of the extra three degrees the world’s gained since the oldest members of their pods were born?
Maybe this is the upgrade that will finally help her find out...
5000 words
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The iron below you was born in the center of a star your people named Coatlicue, long after she was gone. You might say the iron killed her, or she died to make the iron. Or you might describe the subatomic particles and how they fused, because you are a scientist, and you know how metaphors can lie.
Coatlicue was the mother of our sun, and of yours, too, and of all the worlds woven from the dust between.
You see, in a way, we are twins.
3500 words
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Three or four times a week, I walk by the chain link cage on Mission Street—the other part of Mission Street—in front of the gray, spiked wall of the PG&E substation, often on my way to Street Taco on 9th. I always wonder what it holds behind its diamond wires, sections bolted to the sidewalk at haphazard angles to each other, trapping in five Brisbane box trees...
1200 words
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So we sit around our fire in that same silence, staring into the rapid oxidation of alien wood, waiting for the coals to die. The giant centipedes are chittering between the horse-sized mushrooms that surround us. I can hear their chitin crunching through the detritus…
7000 words
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Pushcart Nominee
Someone left cat food in the extremely haunted basement trash room of my building and it made me so hungry I forgot how creeped out I was being down there for a second. So I hit up a photographer I modeled for a couple times to see if he had work for me, and he did. I’m meeting him at the American Hotel, on the bleeding edge of the Tenderloin, about eight blocks from my apartment, with mascara on.
3400 words
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I remember decades ago when this used to be 580, perching my plastic tuatara Korra on the edge of the backseat window, peering past the traffic with her at the sparkling bay. In high school, it was earsplitting demolition, then bare dirt my first year of college. I don’t know what brought me down here after I dropped out, maybe I was drawn to the vacant land because that’s what I felt like, empty and waiting for something new. Even stepping on the field with my own feet, touching its contaminated soil as I planted those first seeds with Marco’s crew, the place itself meant nothing—until you showed up in your dad’s red Ford Prakasha three days into planting...
4000 words
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Fifteen years. I count them by converting Standard to Gregorian badly while my feet move forward without me. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen another human and here’s one at the Stones on Ferocina underneath the glowing rings and stars, swirling a red gourd-bottle while he stares into the bonfire like a human would, like any human would, with the flames flickering across his brown and bearded face. He looks up and he sees me and that must be the same expression that I had a moment earlier: is that a human? No way…
1000 words
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Arthur Corey owns a small house in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s bright lemon yellow, with a lawn he’s trying to kill, and a carport with no car, where a glass table gathers bong ash in the shade of seagrapes...
700 words
